_The Revival of Learning._ The Revival of Learning, or the Renaissance,
began as early as the tenth century. Its period of most rapid progress
was from the twelfth century to the fifteenth. One phase of the interest
in the revival of learning was the effort to restore Latin to its
ancient purity. The word "grammarian" was more widely inclusive than
now, meaning one who devoted himself to general learning. Of this poem
Dr. Burton in "Renaissance Pictures in Browning" (_Poet-Lore_, Vol. x,
pp. 60-76, No. 1, 1898) says: "I know of no lyric of the poet's more
representative of his peculiar and virile strength than this, in that it
makes vibrant and thoroughly emotional an apparently unemotional theme.
In relation to the Renaissance, the revival of learning, the moral is
the higher inspiration derived from the new wine of the classics, so
that what in later times has cooled down too often to a dry-as-dust
study of the husks of knowledge is shown to be, at the start, a
veritable reveling in the delights of the fruit."
Mr. Stopford Brooke in _The Poetry of Browning_, p. 155, says, "This is
the artist at work, and I doubt whether all the laborious prose written,
in history and criticism, on the revival of learning, will ever express
better than this short poem the inexhaustible thirst of the Renaissance
in its pursuit of knowledge, or the enthusiasm of the pupils of a New
Scholar for his desperate strife to know in a short life the very center
of the universe."
3. _Leave we the common crofts._ As the procession starts up the hill
they leave behind them the small farms and little villages of the plain.
8. _Rock-row._ Day is just breaking over the rocky summits of the
mountains.
9. _There, man's thought._ The smoking crater of a volcano, described as
a censer from which rise the fumes of incense, portends an outbreak of
subterranean fire. The speaker fancifully considers this an appropriate
spot in which to bury the scholar whose passionate eagerness of thought
chafed continually against the bounds of custom and ignorance and human
weakness.